North Korean leader leaves Vietnam after nuclear summit collapse

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un waves before boarding his train at the Dong Dang railway station in Vietnam. Nuclear disarmament talks between Kim and President Trump broke down Thursday.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un waves before boarding his train at the Dong Dang railway station in Vietnam. Nuclear disarmament talks between Kim and President Trump broke down Thursday.

Photo: Vietnam News Agency

Photo: Vietnam News Agency

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North Korean leader Kim Jong Un waves before boarding his train at the Dong Dang railway station in Vietnam. Nuclear disarmament talks between Kim and President Trump broke down Thursday.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un waves before boarding his train at the Dong Dang railway station in Vietnam. Nuclear disarmament talks between Kim and President Trump broke down Thursday.

Photo: Vietnam News Agency

North Korean leader leaves Vietnam after nuclear summit collapse

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DONG DANG, Vietnam — Smiling and holding up his clasped hands in a victorious pose, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un boarded his private train Saturday at the Vietnam-China border for a 60-plus-hour ride home, ending a trip to Vietnam that saw a summit breakdown with President Trump.

He spent his last day in Hanoi laying large red-and-yellow wreaths at a war memorial and at the mausoleum of national hero Ho Chi Minh, surrounded by Vietnamese soldiers and his own entourage of top North Korean officials. At the border, he got out of his armored limousine and clasped his hands, waving to a crowd of people cheering his departure.

Since Trump flew home to Washington, Kim has stepped assuredly into the spotlight, keen to show himself as a poised leader taking his rightful place on the international stage. He met Friday with President Nguyen Phu Trong, the country’s top leader and Communist Party chief, grinning broadly as he was feted by top officials and escorted down a red carpet.

As Kim met with officials in Hanoi, the United States and North Korea have both been spinning their versions of what happened during one of the most high-profile diplomatic collapses in recent years.

But some experts believe that Kim, by standing shoulder to shoulder with Trump at a summit that captivated many around the world, will have one sure win: He’ll be able to portray himself to his people and supporters as the charismatic head of a nuclear power, not an international pariah that starves its citizens so it can build arms and missiles.

Talks between Kim and Trump broke down Thursday, the second day of their two-day summit, in a dispute over how much sanctions relief Washington should provide Pyongyang in return for nuclear disarmament steps. Despite a senior North Korean official’s suggestion — in a rushed, middle-of-the-night news conference called to dispute Trump’s version of the summit’s end — that Kim may have “lost the will” for diplomacy, the North Korean leader seems to have emerged from the diplomatic wreckage as a winner.

Kim answered questions with humor and ease when confronted by an aggressive international media contingent. And, crucially for his image at home, he stood firm on his demands for relief from sanctions imposed over a nuclear program North Korea says it built in the face of unrelenting U.S. hostility meant to end its leadership.

Kim, as he considers his next move after Hanoi, will be backed by state-controlled media that were already busy portraying the summit as a victory for their leader, saying Kim and Trump “appreciated that the second meeting in Hanoi offered an important occasion for deepening mutual respect and trust and putting the relations between the two countries on a new stage.”

North Korea said it had asked for partial sanctions relief in return for closing its main nuclear site at Yongbyon, an important nuclear-fuel production facility but not the only place the North is believed to make bomb fuel.

The United States also has been spinning the summit breakdown, with senior officials saying North Korea wanted billions of dollars in sanctions relief in return for only partial dismantlement of Yongbyon, and demanded the North scrap more of its nuclear program for such a high level of concessions.

Trump maintained ahead of the Hanoi summit that the economic benefits of a deal could push Kim to give up his nuclear ambitions.

Kim came into the summit feeling confident that he could settle something that would end painful economic sanctions while letting him keep much of his nuclear program and only making a “a variety of gestures that mimic disarmament,” Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, wrote after the summit collapse.